Throughout the evening he had of course been preoccupied7 by the consciousness of having in his pocket bank-notes to a value unknown. Several times he had sought for a suitable opportunity to disclose his exciting secret. But he had found none. In practice he could not say to his aunt, before Julian and Rachel: "Auntie, I picked up a lot of bank-notes on the landing. You really ought to be more careful!" He could not even in any way refer to them. The dignity of Mrs. Maldon had intimidated8 him. He had decided9, after Julian's announcement of departure, that he would hand them over to her, simply and undramatically and with no triumphant10 air, as soon as he and she should for a moment be alone together. Then Mrs. Maldon vanished upstairs. And she had not returned. Rachel also had vanished. And he was waiting.
He desired to examine the notes, to let his eyes luxuriously11 rest upon them, but he dared not take them from his pocket lest one or other of the silent-footed women might surprise him by a sudden entrance. He fingered them as they lay in their covert12, and the mere13 feel of them, raised exquisite14 images in his mind; and at the same time the whole room and every object in the room was transformed into a secret witness which spied upon him, disquieted15 him, and warned him. But the fact that the notes were intact, that nothing irremediable had occurred, reassured16 him and gave him strength, so that he could defy the suspicions of those senseless surrounding objects.
Within the room there was no sound but the faint regular hiss17 of the gas and an occasional falling together of coal in the weakening fire. Overhead, from his aunt's bedroom, vague movements were perceptible. Then these ceased, absolutely. The tension, increasing, grew too much for him, and with a curt18 gesture, and a self-conscious expression between a smile and a frown, he left the parlour and stood to listen in the lobby. Not for several seconds did he notice the heavy ticking of the clock, close to his ear, nor the chill draught19 that came under the front door. He gazed up into the obscurity at the top of the stairs. The red glow of the kitchen fire, in the distance to the right of the stairs, caught his attention at intervals20. He was obsessed21, almost overpowered, by the mysteriousness of the first floor. What had happened? What was happening? And suddenly an explanation swept into his brain—the obvious explanation. His aunt had missed the bank-notes and was probably at that very instant working herself into an anguish22. What ought he to do? Should he run up and knock at her door? He was spared a decision by the semi-miraculous appearance of Rachel at the top of the stairs. She started.
"Oh! How you frightened me!" she exclaimed in a low voice.
He answered weakly, charmingly—
"Did I?"
"Will you please come and speak to Mrs. Maldon? She wants you."
"In her room?"
Rachel nodded and disappeared before he could ask another question. With heart beating he ascended23 the stairs by twos. Through the half-open door of the faintly lit room which he himself would occupy he could hear Rachel active. And then he was at the closed door of his aunt's room. "I must be jolly careful how I do it!" he thought as he knocked.
II
He was surprised, and impressed, to see Mrs. Maldon in bed. She lay on her back, with her striking head raised high on several pillows. Nothing else of her was visible; the purple eider-down covered the whole bed without a crease24.
"Hello, auntie!" he greeted her, instinctively25 modifying his voice to the soft gentleness proper to the ordered and solemn chamber26.
Mrs. Maldon, moving her head, looked at him in silence. He tiptoed to the foot of the bed and leaned on it gracefully27. And as in the parlour his shadow had fallen on the table, so now, with the gas just behind him, it fell on the bed. The room was chilly28 and had a slight pharmaceutical29 odour.
Mrs. Maldon said, with a weak effort—
"I was feeling faint, and Rachel thought I'd better get straight to bed. I'm an old woman, Louis."
"She hasn't missed them!" he thought in a flash, and said, aloud—
"Nothing of the sort, auntie."
He was aware of the dim reflection of himself in the mirror of the immense Victorian mahogany wardrobe to his left.
Mrs. Maldon again hesitated before speaking.
"You aren't ill, are you, auntie?" he said in a cheerful, friendly whisper. He was touched by the poignant30 pathos31 of her great age and her debility. It rent his heart to think that she had no prospect32 but the grave.
She murmured, ignoring his question—
"I just wanted to tell you that you needn't go down home for your night things—unless you specially33 want to, that is. I have all that's necessary here, and I've given orders to Rachel."
"Certainly, auntie. I won't leave the house. That's all right."
No, she assuredly had not missed the notes! He was strangely uplifted. He felt almost joyous34 in his relief. Could he tell her now as she lay in her bed? Impossible! He would tell her in the morning. It would be cruel to disturb her now with such a revelation of her own negligence35. He vibrated with sympathy for her, and he was proud to think that she appreciated the affectionate, comprehending, subdued36 intimacy37 of his attitude towards her as he leaned gracefully on the foot of the bed, and that she admired him. He did not know, or rather he absolutely did not realize, that she was acquainted with aught against his good fame. He forgot his sins with the insouciance38 of an animal.
"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him. "A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I know you'll see that everything's locked up."
He nodded soothingly39, and stood upright.
"You might turn the gas down, rather low."
He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two windows.
"That do?"
"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me." Her voice seemed to expire.
He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.
From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring40 field of adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing, where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom, which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then descended41. The kitchen was lighted.
"Are you there?" he asked.
"Yes," replied Rachel.
"May I come?"
"Why, of course!" Her voice trembled.
He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment42 to themselves.
III
Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor43 crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous44.
Mrs. Maldon's kitchen—or rather Rachel's—was small, warm (though the fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window, a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range, and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils45; sundry46 other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise47 of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.
The uncurtained window, instead of showing black, gave on another interior, whitewashed48, and well illuminated49 by the kitchen gas. This other interior had, under a previous tenant50 of the property, been a lean-to greenhouse, but Mrs. Maldon esteeming51 a scullery before a greenhouse, it had been modified into a scullery. There it was that Julian Maldon had preferred to make his toilet. One had to pass through the scullery in order to get from the kitchen into the yard. And the light of day had to pass through the imperfectly transparent53 glass roof of the scullery in order to reach the window of the unused room behind the parlour; and herein lay the reason why that room was unused, it being seldom much brighter than a crypt.
At the table stood Rachel, in her immense pinafore-apron54, busy with knives and forks and spoons, and an enamel55 basin from which steam rose gently. Louis looked upon Rachel, and for the first time in his life liked an apron! It struck him as an exceedingly piquant56 addition to the young woman's garments. It suited her; it set off the tints57 of her notable hair; and it suited the kitchen. Without delaying her work, Rachel made the protector of the house very welcome. Obviously she was in a high state of agitation58. For an instant Louis feared that the agitation was due to anxiety on account of Mrs. Maldon.
"Nothing serious up with the old lady, is there?" he asked, pinching the cigarette to regularize the tobacco in it.
"Oh, no!"
The exclamation59 in its absolute sincerity60 dissipated every trace of his apprehension61. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation. It was caused solely62 by his entrance into the kitchen, by the compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious of herself—all because he had come into her kitchen! She could not conceal63—perhaps she did not wish to conceal—the joy that his near presence inspired. Louis had had few adventures, very few, and this experience was exquisite and wondrous64 to him. It roused, not the fatuous65 coxcomb66, nor the Lothario, but that in him which was honest and high-spirited. A touch of the male's vanity, not surprising, was to be excused.
"Mrs. Maldon," said Rachel, "had an idea that it was me who suggested your staying all night instead of your cousin." She raised her chin, and peered at nothing through the window as she rubbed away at a spoon.
"But when?" Louis demanded, moving towards the fire. It appeared to him that the conversation had taken a most interesting turn.
"When?... When you brought the tray in here for me, I suppose."
"And I suppose you explained to her that I had the idea all out of my own little head?"
"I told her that I should never have dreamed of asking such a thing!" The susceptible67 and proud young creature indicated that the suggestion was one of Mrs. Maldon's rare social errors, and that Mrs. Maldon had had a narrow escape of being snubbed for it by the woman of the world now washing silver. "I'm no more afraid of burglars than you are," Rachel added. "I should just like to catch a burglar here—that I should!"
Louis indulgently doubted the reality of this courage. He had been too hastily concluding that what Rachel resented was an insinuation of undue68 interest in himself, whereas she now made it seem that she was objecting merely to any reflection upon her valour: which was much less exciting to him. Still, he thought that both causes might have contributed to her delightful69 indignation.
"Why was she so keen about having one of us to sleep here to-night?" Louis inquired.
"Well, I don't know that she was," answered Rachel. "If you hadn't said anything—"
"Oh, but do you know what she said to me upstairs?"
"No."
"She didn't want me even to go back to my digs for my things. Evidently she doesn't care for the house to be left even for half an hour."
"Well, of course old people are apt to get nervous, you know—especially when they're not well."
"Funny, isn't it?"
There was perfect unanimity70 between them as to the irrational71 singularity and sad weakness of aged72 persons.
Louis remarked—
"She said you would make everything right for me upstairs."
"I have done—I hope," said Rachel.
"Thanks awfully73!"
One part of the table was covered with newspaper. Suddenly Rachel tore a strip off the newspaper, folded the strip into a spill, and, lighting74 it at the gas, tendered it to Louis' unlit cigarette.
The climax75 of the movement was so quick and unexpected as almost to astound76 Louis. For he had been standing6 behind her, and she had not turned her head before making the spill. Perhaps there was a faint reflection of himself in the window. Or perhaps she had eyes in her hair. Beyond doubt she was a strange, rare, angelic girl. The gesture with which she modestly offered the spill was angelic; it was divine; it was one of those phenomena77 which persist in a man's memory for decades. At the very instant of its happening he knew that he should never forget it.
The man of fashion blushed as he inhaled78 the first smoke created by her fire.
Rachel dropped the heavenly emblem79, all burning, into the ash-bin of the range, and resumed her work.
Louis coughed. "Any law against sitting down?" he asked.
"You're very welcome," she replied primly80.
"I didn't know I might smoke," he said.
She made no answer at first, but just as Louis had ceased to expect an answer, she said—
"I should think if you can smoke in the sitting-room82 you can smoke in the kitchen—shouldn't you?"
"I should," said he.
There was silence, but silence not disagreeable. Louis, lolling in the chair, and slightly rocking it, watched Rachel at her task. She completely immersed spoons and forks in the warm water, and then rubbed them with a brush like a large nail-brush, giving particular attention to the inside edges of the prongs of the forks; and then she laid them all wet on a thick cloth to the right of the basin. But of the knives she immersed only the blades, and took the most meticulous83 care that no drop of water should reach the handles.
"I never knew knives and forks and things were washed like that," observed Louis.
"They generally aren't," said Rachel. "But they ought to be. I leave all the other washing-up for the charwoman in the morning, but I wouldn't trust these to her." (The charwoman had been washing up cutlery since before Rachel was born.) "They're all alike," said Rachel.
Louis acquiesced84 sagely85 in this broad generalization86 as to charwomen.
"Why don't you wash the handles of the knives?" he queried87.
"It makes them come loose."
"Really?"
"Do you mean to say you didn't know that water, especially warm water with soda88 in it, loosens the handles?" She showed astonishment89, but her gaze never left the table in front of her.
"Not me!"
"Well, I should have thought that everybody knew that. Some people use a jug90, and fill it up with water just high enough to cover the blades, and stick the knives in to soak. But I don't hold with that because of the steam, you see. Steam's nearly as bad as water for the handles. And then some people drop the knives wholesale91 into a basin just for a second, to wash the handles. But I don't hold with that, either. What I say is that you can get the handles clean with the cloth you wipe them dry with. That's what I say."
"And so there's soda in the water?"
"A little."
"Well, I never knew that either! It's quite a business, it seems to me."
Without doubt Louis' notions upon domestic work were being modified with extreme rapidity. In the suburb from which he sprang domestic work—and in particular washing up—had been regarded as base, foul92, humiliating, unmentionable—as toil52 that any slut might perform anyhow. It would have been inconceivable to him that he should admire a girl in the very act of washing up. Young ladies, even in exclusive suburban93 families, were sometimes forced by circumstances to wash up—of that he was aware—but they washed up in secret and in shame, and it was proper for all parties to pretend that they never had washed up. And here was Rachel converting the horrid94 process into a dignified95 and impressive ritual. She made it as fine as fine needlework—so exact, so dainty, so proud were the motions of her fingers and her forearms. Obviously washing up was an art, and the delicate operation could not be scamped nor hurried ...
The triple pile of articles on the cloth grew slowly, but it grew; and then Rachel, having taken a fresh white cloth from a hook, began to wipe, and her wiping was an art. She seemed to recognize each fork as a separate individuality, and to attend to it as to a little animal. Whatever her view of charwomen, never would she have said of forks that they were all alike.
Louis felt in his hip96 pocket for his reserve cigarette-case.
And Rachel immediately said, with her back to him—
"Have you really got a revolver, or were you teasing—just now in the parlour?"
It was then that he perceived a small unframed mirror, hung at the height of her face on the broad, central, perpendicular97 bar of the old-fashioned window-frame. Through this mirror the chit—so he named her in his mind at the instant—had been surveying him!
"Yes," he said, producing the second cigarette-case, "I was only teasing." He lit a fresh cigarette from the end of the previous one.
"Well," she said, "you did frighten Mrs. Maldon. I was so sorry for her."
"And what about you? Weren't you frightened?"
"Oh no! I wasn't frightened. I guessed, somehow, you were only teasing."
"Well, I just wasn't teasing, then!" said Louis, triumphantly98 yet with benevolence99. And he drew a revolver from his pocket.
She turned her head now, and glanced neutrally at the incontestable revolver for a second. But she made no remark whatever, unless the pouting100 of her tightly shut lips and a mysterious smile amounted to a remark.
Louis adopted an indifferent tone—
"Strange that the old lady should be so nervous just to-night—isn't it?—seeing these burglars have been knocking about for over a fortnight. Is this the first time she's got excited about it?"
"Yes, I think it is," said Rachel faintly, as it were submissively, with no sign of irritation101 against him.
With their air of worldliness and mature wisdom they twittered on like a couple of sparrows—inconsequently, capriciously; and nothing that they said had the slightest originality102, weight, or importance. But they both thought that their conversation was full of significance; which it was, though they could not explain it to themselves. What they happened to say did not matter in the least. If they had recited the Koran to each other the inexplicable103 significance of their words would have been the same.
Rachel faced him again, leaning her hands behind her on the table, and said with the most enchanting104, persuasive105 friendliness—
"I wasn't frightened—truly! I don't know why I looked as though I was."
"You mean about the revolver—in the sitting-room?" He jumped nimbly back after her to the revolver question.
"Yes. Because I'm quite used to revolvers, you know. My brother had one. Only his was a Colt—one of those long things."
"Your brother, eh?"
"Yes. Did you know him?"
"I can't say I did," Louis replied, with some constraint106.
Rachel said with generous enthusiasm—
"He's a wonderful shot, my brother is!"
Louis was curiously107 touched by the warmth of her reference to her brother. In the daily long monotonous108 column of advertisements headed succinctly109 "Money" in the Staffordshire Signal, there once used to appear the following invitation: "WE NEVER REFUSE a loan to a responsible applicant110. No fussy111 inquiries112. Distance no objection. Reasonable terms. Strictest privacy. £3 to £10,000. Apply personally or by letter. Lovelace Curzon, 7 Colclough Street, Knype." Upon a day Louis had chosen that advertisement from among its rivals, and had written to Lovelace Curzon. But on the very next day he had come into his thousand pounds, and so had lost the advantage of business relations with Lovelace Curzon. Lovelace Curzon, as he had learnt later, was Reuben Fleckring, Rachel's father. Or, more accurately113, Lovelace Curzon was Reuben Fleckring, junior, Rachel's brother, a young man in a million. Reuben, senior, had been for many years an entirely114 mediocre115 and ambitionless clerk in a large works where Julian Maldon had learnt potting, when Reuben, junior (whom he blindly adored), had dragged him out of clerkship, and set him up as the nominal116 registered head of a money-lending firm. An amazing occurrence! At that time Reuben, junior, was a minor, scarcely eighteen. Yet his turn for finance had been such that he had already amassed117 reserves, and—without a drop of Jewish blood in his veins—possessed confidence enough to compete in their own field with the acutest Hebrews of the district. Reuben, senior, was the youth's tool.
In a few years Lovelace Curzon had made a mighty118 and terrible reputation in the world where expenditures119 exceed incomes. And then the subterranean120 news of the day—not reported in the Signal—was that something serious had happened to Lovelace Curzon. And the two Fleckrings went to America, the father, as usual, hypnotized by the son. And they left no wrack121 behind save Rachel.
It was at this period—only a few months previous to the opening of the present narrative—that the district had first heard aught of the womenfolk of the Fleckrings. An aunt—Reuben, senior's, sister, it appeared—had died several years earlier, since when Rachel had alone kept house for her brother and her father. According to rumour122 the three had lived in the simplicity123 of relative poverty, utterly124 unvisited except by clients. No good smell of money had ever escaped from the small front room which was employed as an office into the domestic portion of the house. It was alleged125 that Rachel had existed in perfect ignorance of all details of the business. It was also alleged that when the sudden crisis arrived, her brother had told her that she would not be taken to America, and that, briefly126, she must shift for herself in the world. It was alleged further that he had given her forty-five pounds. (Why forty-five pounds and not fifty, none knew.) The whole affair had begun and finished—and the house was sold up—in four days. Public opinion in the street and in Knype blew violently against the two Reubens, but as they were on the Atlantic it did not affect them. Rachel, with scarcely an acquaintance in the world in which she was to shift for herself, found that she had a streetful of friends! It transpired127 that everybody had always divined that she was a girl of admirable efficient qualities. She behaved as though her brother and father had behaved in quite a usual and proper manner. Assistance in the enterprise of shifting for herself she welcomed, but not sympathy. The devotion of the Fleckring women began to form a legend. People said that Rachel's aunt had been another such creature as Rachel.
Hence the effect on Louis, who, through his aunt and his cousin, was acquainted with the main facts and surmises128, of Rachel's glowing reference to the vanished Reuben.
"Where did your brother practise?" he asked.
"In the cellar."
"Of course it's easier with a long barrel."
"Is it?" she said incredulously. "You should see my brother's score-card the first time he shot at that new miniature rifle-range in Hanbridge!"
"Why? Is it anything special?"
"Well, you should see it. Five bulls, all cutting into each other."
"I should have liked to see that."
"I've got it upstairs in my trunk," said she proudly. "I dare say I'll show you it some time."
"I wish you would," he urged.
Such loyalty129 moved him deeply. Louis had had no sisters, and his youthful suburban experience of other people's sisters had not fostered any belief that loyalty was an outstanding quality of sisters. Like very numerous young men of the day, he had passed an unfavourable judgment130 upon young women. He had found them greedy for diversion, amazingly ruthless in their determination to exact the utmost possible expensiveness of pleasure in return for their casual society, hard, cruelly clever in conversation, efficient in certain directions, but hating any sustained effort, and either socially or artistically131 or politically snobbish132. Snobs133 all! Money-worshippers all!... Well, nearly all! It mattered not whether you were one of the dandies or one of the hatless or Fletcherite corps134 that lolled on foot or on bicycles, or shot on motor-cycles, through the prim81 streets of the suburb—the young women would not remain in dalliance with you for the mere sake of your beautiful eyes. Because they were girls they would take all that you had and more, and give you nothing but insolence135 or condescension136 in exchange. Such was Louis' judgment, and scores of times he had confirmed it in private saloon-lounge talk with his compeers. It had not, however, rendered the society of these unconscionable and cold female creatures distasteful to him. Not a bit! He had even sought it and been ready to pay for that society in the correct manner—even to imperturbably137 beggaring himself of his final sixpence in order to do the honours of the latest cinema. Only, he had a sense of human superiority. It certainly did not occur to him that in the victimized young men there might exist faults which complemented138 those of the parasitic139 young women.
And now he contrasted these young women with Rachel! And he fell into a dreamy mood of delight in her.... Her gesture in lighting his cigarette! Marvellous! Tear-compelling!... Flippancy140 dropped away from him.... She liked him. With the most alluring innocence141, she did not conceal that she liked him. He remembered that the last time he called at his aunt's he had remarked something strange, something disturbing, in Rachel's candid142 demeanour towards himself. He had made an impression on her! He had given her the lightning-stroke! No shadow of a doubt as to his own worthiness143 crossed his mind.
What did cross his mind was that she was not quite of his own class. In the suburb, where "sets" are divided one from another by unscalable barriers, she could not have aspired144 to him. But in the kitchen, now become the most beautiful and agreeable and romantic interior that he had ever seen—in the kitchen he could somehow perceive with absolute clearness that the snobbery145 of caste was silly, negligible, laughable, contemptible146. Yes, he could perceive all that! Life in the kitchen seemed ideal—life with that loyalty and that candour and that charm and that lovely seriousness! Moreover, he could teach her. She had already blossomed—in a fortnight. She was blossoming. She would blossom further.
Odd that, when he had threatened to pull out a revolver, she, so accustomed to revolvers, should have taken a girlish alarm! That queer detail of her behaviour was extraordinarily147 seductive. But far beyond everything else it was the grand loyalty of her nature that drew him. He wanted to sink into it as into a bed of down. He really needed it. Enveloped148 in that loving loyalty of a creature who gave all and demanded nothing, he felt that he could truly be his best self, that he could work marvels149. His eyes were moist with righteous ardour.
The cutlery reposed150 in a green-lined basket. She had doffed151 the apron and hung it behind the scullery door. With all the delicious curves of her figure newly revealed, she was reaching the alarm-clock down from the mantelpiece, and then she was winding152 it up. The ratchet of the wheel clacked, and the hurried ticking was loud. In the grate of the range burned one spot of gloomy red.
"Your bedtime, I suppose?" he murmured, rising elegantly.
She smiled. She said—
"Shall you lock up, or shall I?"
"Oh! I think I know all the tricks," he replied, and thought, "She's a pretty direct sort of girl, anyway!"
《How to Live on 24 Hours a Day》
